I would like to invite you all to participate in an Ad-hoc
Authorship Attribution Competition, to be held as part of the
2004 Joint International Conference of the Association for
Literary and Linguistic Computing and the Association for Computers
and the Humanities (ALLC/ACH 2004). My hope is to establish a
collection of the best techniques and methods in inferring
document authorship from participants around the world.

Recent years have seen a tremendous increase in interest in
the problem of determining the author of a disputed or unknown
document using computer-aided or even complete computer-driven
analysis. We hope to bring together the users and the
developers of this technology to share and to compare their
methods and results. This competition will help to create
a set of ``best practices'' in authorship attribution that
can standardize analyses and spur the development of new
and improved methods.

The competition will be run using a set of specially developed
corpora (of various sorts) that will be distributed ``anonymously''
to participating researchers. Researchers will be asked to
submit their programs which will analyze the documents and determine
who wrote each individual document. The results will be tabulated
and are planned to be presented as a special session of the ALLC/ACH
meeting in Goteborg, Sweden (June 11-16, 2004). Participation in
this conference will be encouraged but not required.

Unfortunately, the University of Virginia has
had to back away from their earlier support in terms of publishing
an edited volume of papers and software
describing the various methods. I am currently discussing this project
with other publishers, as I consider this volume to be an important
way of getting this kind of enabling technology into the hands of scholars
and researchers who need it. Participants in the competition
will be invited to submit to this volume. Technical support for
developing, testing, and standardizing software will be
available from the Digital Humanities Developer's Consortium
to help in the production of high quality, end-user friendly
software to encourage use and reuse of the methods presented.